Recent News & Accomplishments
2014
UMD CS Alumnus Amnon Lotem (Ph.D. 2000) and co-authors Ronald Fagin and Moni Naor have been honored with the 2014 G ö del Prize for their paper, Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware. This paper introduces the “threshold algorithm”, which is used for gathering multi-sourced information, and provides a framework to design and analyze algorithms that can help aggregate information from multiple data sources. The G ö del prize recognizes outstanding papers in theoretical computer science and is presented by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and ACM’s... read more
Sergey Ivanov, the IT Systems Administrator for the CS Department, participated in the 117th Boston Marathon on April 24th 2014. On that cool, clear day, Sergey ran 26.2 miles through Massachusetts. Starting in Hopkinton, he ran 13.1 miles northeast to Wellesley, then ran another seven miles to Newton’s Heartbreak Hill, and then on to the finish line in Boston. Sergey competed in what can only be described as barefoot running sandals (entirely reminiscent of footwear that might have been worn by athletes in the ancient Olympics). He finished the race in an impressive time of 3:37:55 at a pace... read more
Bitcamp supported in part by the UMD Computer Science Department
Bitcamp, the University of Maryland’s first Major League Hackathon, drew nearly 700 students from colleges as far away as Toronto, Canada. Bitcamp opened with a keynote speech from Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov, of Oculus VR. read more
Computer Science Department undergraduate student Fang Cao has been awarded a 2014 Truman Scholarship. read more
Computer Science Department Ph.D. Student Rajesh Chitnis has been awarded the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences Board of Visitors Outstanding Graduate Student Award. read more
Computer Science Department Professor Hanan Samet has been awarded the 2014 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest technical honor awarded by the IEEE Computer Society. read more
Computer Science Department Ph.D. student Vahid Liaghat has been awarded an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014-2015 academic year. read more
Dr. Jandelyn Plane, Director of the Maryland Center for Women in Computing, has been awarded the 2014 Women in Technology Social Impact IT Leadership Award. read more
Computer Science Department Assistant Professor David Van Horn’s book Realm of Racket: Learn to Program, One Game at a Time has been selected as a 2013 Notable Book in Computing as part of the ACM Computing Reviews’ Best of 2013, which consists of books and articles selected by the computing community. Realm of Racket teaches readers to program by leading them through the creation of a series of increasingly complex games. Van Horn co-authored Realm of Racket with Northeastern University Professor Matthias Felleisen, Dr. Conrad Barski, and eight undergraduate students from Northeastern... read more
Computer Science Department Professor Hanan Samet is one of three scholars recognized as 2014 University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Fellows. The UCGIS Fellows Program celebrates the extraordinary record of achievements of individuals in a variety of spatial disciplines and communities of practice that use spatial information. Samet's work in "designing and using hierarchical spatial data structures for GIS, such as the quadtree and octree, have had a tremendous impact on GIScience research and software development," says the UCGIS. In addition to his data structure... read more